Projects: Collaborate.Health
Quality Improvement in Lesotho
Identifying issues and developing solutions for Quality Improvement (QI) in Community Health Centers in Leribe.
- Agency Partner
- Lesotho-Boston Health Alliance
- Course
- Program Implementation for Global Health
Overview
Identifying issues and developing solutions for Quality Improvement (QI) in Community Health Centers in Leribe. Included supporting management teams and clinical staff to identify problems, develop solutions, and monitor improvement.
Context
The Boston-Lesotho Health Alliance, LeBoHa, is based at Motebang District Hospital in the Leribe District of Lesotho. LeBoHA is deeply integrated with the District Hospital and community health centers in Leribe and is currently working in 18 of the 28 health centers in the Leribe District to train nurse-midwives in basic midwifery skills and to promote uptake of midwifery services at the community level. In addition to having adequate staff at the health centers to perform safe deliveries, women in the community need to feel confident and comfortable with the quality of services provided.
Challenge
Currently, there is little information from the patients’ perspectives on maternal and midwifery services at the Leribe health centers. LeBoHA would like to assist the community health centers in identifying challenges and developing solutions to improve the patient experience, particularly for maternal and midwifery services. Since QI is a relatively new concept for some health centers, LeBoHa will need to develop a training program and inform staff about the purpose of QI, the QI process and how it can benefit the health centers.
Solution
Guidance on setting up a quality improvement program in Leribe and a set of quality improvement tools that can help LeBoHA improve the quality of services and standardize high-quality care in Community Health Centers in the Leribe district.
Results
A consulting report containing a seven step framework to help train staff/leadership on the purpose of QI, the QI process, and how to develop plans to improve the needs for a facility. Recommendations center on increasing collaboration with the Community Health Centers to empower management teams and clinical staff, particularly nurses and midwives, to identify problems, develop solutions, and monitor improvement in order to have sustainable improvements.
Project Timeline
This project took seven months to complete from kick-off meeting to presentation of final deliverables. Click the button below for a detailed timeline.
View Project Timeline
Student Spotlight
Katie Berry
During my Implementing Programs in Developing Countries course, I served as a student consultant for the Lesotho-Boston Health Alliance (LeBoHA). My team was tasked with responding to scopes of work related to human resource management, quality improvement, health information systems, supply chain management, and financial management.
At the end of the semester, LeBoHA indicated that they were interested in implementing the seven-step framework developed by my team to help launch a quality improvement (QI) initiative in Lesotho. As a result of leadership demonstrated in GH743, I was invited by LeBoHA to spend four months in rural Lesotho to oversee the implementation of QI trainings in community health centers. Upon arriving in Lesotho, I formed a QI collaboration between LeBoHA, the University Research Council (URC) and the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF), and developed a one-hundred-page QI manual that will be used to support both current and future QI projects run by URC, EGPAF, and LeBoHA.